Sidewalk Social Scientist

GREASE 2 WAS AMAZING! WAIT! NO, IT TOTALLY WASN'T.

Say what you will about it, but I say Grease 2 is a cinematic masterpiece (except no it's not). I remember watching it in Penticton at our family friends’ home during the summer of 1984 (I think), oh about 100 times. They had Pay TV which at that point in Canada was new and not a lot of people had it. The fun part about SuperChannel was that they showed the same movies constantly. I remember seeing things as varied as Deadly Blessing to Querelle.  I also saw Sahara and tons of other forgettable crap including multiple showings of Grease 2.

So the movie opens with a “Back to School” number and we see all the olds, including Frenchie, are back. Eve Arden, Sid Caesar, and Dodi Goodman reprise their roles and for their sakes, I hope they got paid beaucoup. We also get introduced to our leads. One is played by future superstar Michelle Pfeiffer, but in Grease 2, she’s a bona fide Pink Lady and is already a bad girl like I would imagine Sandy would’ve been after that car landed and she had to live a year and a half or so with Danny. No Slutty Sandy transformation for her. She’s a bit of a tomboy named Stephanie Zinoni and nothing she wears in this movie looks like anything anyone wore in 1961. During this scene we also meet Michael, Sandy’s cousin who has an English accent that is nowhere near an Australian accent. Michael is (gasp!) as wholesome and preppy and nice as his cousin was before those nasty Pink Ladies got at her. That being said, he’s no John Travolta when it comes to singing and dancing.

The next big number is about bowling and it is no “Summer Nights” but they do sing about scoring so I guess they get a point for being risqué. I remember one of the adults I watched it with the first time saying, “I don’t remember all these faggy dancers in the first one.” The music and dancing were pretty over the top in Grease 2 and Michelle Pfeiffer smartly wears sunglasses throughout this whole number as if she knew she’d rue the day.

Sandy’s cousin Michael is just showing up at the end of the song with his Bowling Handbook as if he’s desperate to make friends and, of course, everyone treats him like shit. Stephanie and Michael share their first kiss when Stephanie is dared to kiss the next guy who comes through the door. Of course, Michael is now hooked. I would get to know how Michael felt a few years later when this one hot guy came over and planted a nice, long, hot kiss on me and then walked back to his deaf group of friends who all laughed and laughed and laughed. This didn’t send me on a course of buying a motorcycle or anything but I get what Michael felt there.

Michael approaches Stephanie at rehearsals for the show the school is putting on (these people sing and dance way more than in the first one. Seriously) and wants to go out with her. When he asks her out and she says no and he says, “How about the day after tomorrow?” Michelle Pfeiffer’s showcase song, “Cool Rider” gets sung here and basically she’s way too sexy to be in High School, but we do get a glimpse in this number of why she became so famous. When played against “Hopelessly Devoted to You” it doesn’t compare. Sandy got to wipe away her imaginary Danny with scented paper in someone’s back yard kiddie pool while the bitches upstairs made fun of her. Stephanie wears black skinny jeans and rides a ladder while singing about being burned “through and through” on a ladder.

The next number is a pretty funny-ish song about Reproduction, called, “Reproduction” with Tab Hunter trying his best to sing the facts of life to a bunch of horny teens. It should be noted that Adrian Zmed plays the Kenickie role except Kenickie’s into Stephanie so he’s a bit of a dick. His girlfriend who amounts to a piece on the side is no Betty Rizzo. They got Lorna Luft, Judy Garland’s daughter and Liza Minnelli’s sister to play the 40 year old teen in the sequel. At least they kept the tradition of having one Pink Lady who was post-menopausal.

There’s also a couple of twins who weren’t Olsens but had a sitcom and Lorna Luft’s character’s sister is played by future Louis CK actress Pamela Aldon, which doesn’t matter but is trivially interesting.

Frenchie shows up all beauty school dropped out and back at Rydell but everyone kinda treats her like shit. She has a talk with Michael and it turns out he’s getting the Slutty Sandy makeover. We see the beginnings of this while he buys a motorcycle and learns to ride it while an instrumental version of “Cool Rider” plays.  Soon enough, he shows up at the bowling alley in leathers and motorcycle-fights with the T-Birds rivals while everyone sings, “Who’s That Guy,” because a motorcycle helmet and goggles obscures anybody’s identity.

Michelle Pfeiffer gets to be all sexy tomboy while working at the family gas station and is being run around and not really paying attention when the mysterious biker shows up wearing a helmet, goggles and shirtless under a half zipped leather jacket. Stephanie has no idea it’s Michael and hops on the back of his bike and proceeds to fall in love while a sultry saxophone version of “Cool Rider” plays. One wonders if the producers thought this song would be a hit.

There is a patriotic song sung in a nuclear fallout shelter where one of the T-Birds tries to convince his girlfriend they should lose their virginities to each other while singing, “Let’s Do it for Our Country,” which sorta worked and was almost funny. I think I really liked it because he was the second hottest guy in the cast. A couple of years later he would show up on Thirtysomething as a gay friend of Melissa’s.

Michael gets his moody song in the cafeteria at school and “Charades” is no “Sandy” by any stretch. This poor guy can barely sing and this number really showcases this. At least Stockard Channing sold the shit out of her at-school number, and she was the same age as I am when she played the role.

So a bunch of stuff happens where the T-Birds chase Michael the mysterious biker off a cliff and it appears that he is dead. So, of course, the rest of the cast returns to school to perform in the talent show. Somehow, during the girls’ number, a star that Stephanie’s holding flies away from her (presumably using the same weird flying power that Danny and Sandy flew away with during the end of the first flick) and the next thing you know she’s in Biker Heaven singing a hilariously bad duet with Michael. Also since this movie took place in 1961 perhaps Stephanie’s flight of fancy is a nod to the decade’s impending drug culture? Probably not, but it’s fun to think the producers had a clue. The best part of Biker Heaven is that I now have a theme for my wedding if I ever have one. Picture it: white motorcycles strewn about, everyone in white and silver leather and a shit load of dry ice. So stunning.  Plus if they’re in heaven, Michael must really be dead, right?

Not so fast. At the end-of-the-year Luau (they were huge in the 60’s) which does not hold a candle to the carnival of the first movie the cast sings through the manic “Rocka Hula Luau” which isn’t even a thing and can’t even compare with “We Go Together” when the bad biker gang shows up to ruin everything. Just when it seems like this movie will end on a bummer, Michael appears on the roof of one of the structures built for the luau and jumps off it to land on his bike and motorcycle-fight the bad bikers right out of that Luau. Then he gets unmasked and everyone is in love. They sing a ballad about always being together which sucks and then the movie ends as they graduate.

The thing is, when you’re fourteen, everything you watch is good and even I could tell this was the worst. It was one of the first things that I knew was really horrible, but on some level I enjoyed the shit out of it. I’m not a person who believes in “Guilty Pleasures,” or at least I’ve outgrown the idea, but this was something I knew was so lame and I also knew I loved it. I suppose the secret identities and the idea of all that leather appealed to burgeoning sexuality.

In the first Grease which was based on a musical every girl and gay boy of a certain age was taught that smoking was cool and the best way to land a mate was to give up everything about yourself and turn yourself into someone who is the complete opposite of yourself. I could probably go on about how Good/Slutty Sandy screwed up an entire generation, but essentially, Grease is a pretty good flick if you are into musicals or were born in the late sixties/early seventies. I’m not sure children should watch it without a lot of dialogue between them and whatever adult is showing it to them. Mostly to explain how Stockard Channing could possibly be a high school student.

Grease 2 is another (shitty) animal.